<p>Gap years can be taken in varying circumstances:</p>
<ul>
<li>Student applies, is admitted somewhere, then defers admission to a later starting term (if the college allows it).</li>
<li>Student applies, gets shut out, and chooses to do a gap year instead of starting at a community college. During the gap year, s/he applies to colleges.</li>
<li>Student does not apply to colleges, having planned a gap year from the beginning. During the gap year s/he applies to colleges.</li>
</ul>
<p>Of course, a worthwhile gap year needs to have something to do. Often this is work; sometimes it is military service (for multiple gap years). Note that taking college courses after high school graduation will usually disqualify the student from frosh application (though thresholds can vary), so taking college courses during the gap year would not be an option unless the student decides to do the transfer route.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Some majors at some campuses are impacted – meaning that they are more popular than their departments can handle. This means that frosh admission thresholds are higher than for the campus as a whole, and changing into them after enrolling may require another competitive admission process.</p>
<p>Starting at CC with plan to transfer may actually be worth looking into for a very undecided student, since any extra semesters at CC (due to changing major and being “behind” in the new major) cost less than extra semesters at a four year school.</p>
<p>My son is going to speak to a rep in the advising dept. at Cal Poly SLO at the beginning of Aug. She wanted to call him so they could talk about potential majors and what he might see himself doing.</p>
<p>I think he is pretty typical, kjphmom, and I need to keep that in mind.</p>
<p>CC might be the way to go, ucb. They do have creative writing, music, and engineering classes. The local to me colleges don’t have game design or industrial design classes, so no way to test drive those. But for music, it’s more a jazz focus, and not a classical strings. So there are limits to exploration at our local CC.</p>
<p>kjc, I appreciate the advice as far as the diabetes. (There’s a “Parents of T1 diabetics” around here somewhere)</p>
<p>My son’s only ever gone away for 3 1/2 days, but he did manage it well. But I know, as you do, things can change on a dime: pod malfunction, unexplained lows during the night, etc. But I’m always heartened when I hear of students and athletes with T1 that seem to be doing well.</p>
<p>I guess we need to talk about all the possible gap year scenarios. We’ve already told our son it’s ok to just start out at the local CC like everyone else does around here.</p>